In any other season, Eddie Howe would be shoo-in for Manager of Year

At this time of year it’s generally useful to ponder what any particular team’s primary and stretch targets might have been back at the outset.

In terms of neatly and effectively meeting such pre-season brief, there’s a strong argument that nobody can match Eddie Howe’s achievements this season with Newcastle.

Sure, others have more obviously obliterated pre-season targets in more thoroughly dramatic fashions, but we’re not sure anyone has taken the two obvious top objectives for a team this season and delivered in the manner of Newcastle.

Back in the Champions League and ending English football’s most ridiculous trophy drought is special, special stuff.

Yes, there are still formalities to complete on the former and with two games against direct rivals to come, things can still go wrong.

But if anything what we’re seeing from Newcastle right now means they should welcome the chance to face direct rivals like Chelsea and Arsenal. These are teams they’ve sorted out already this season with neither particularly suggesting Newcastle can’t do so again.

With Nottingham Forest limping and Villa three points – and with goal difference effectively four – adrift, Newcastle look pretty cosy in there with the safety net of a final-day task against a beach-bound Everton should they need it. Even the fact that game is at St James’ and not an emotional farewell to Goodison works in Howe and co’s favour.

But while Champions League qualification is big and nice and important, for the fans there was no doubt what mattered most this season.

Sure, the wider media reaction to Newcastle winning the Carabao might have been too saccharine for many tastes, at times giving the impression that Newcastle had invented winning a trophy after not doing so for ages, at others journalists who have apparently never met a single real-life actual football fan expressing bafflement that all supporters of all clubs weren’t all overjoyed and thrilled about it.

This generally took the form of ‘you just don’t understand what it means’ when the truth was ‘we all understand exactly what it means; nobody is confused about why Newcastle fans and staff are delighted about it all, but rather why we’re all supposed to be just as giddy’.

This really should be straightforward. Should, say, Tottenham win the Europa League there will be no equivalent media outpouring, no suggestion that if you aren’t as thrilled as Tottenham fans then you simply Don’t Understand Football.

We’d go further, at risk of going wildly off-topic: thinking everyone should be delighted that it’s got harder to take the p*ss out of a particular football team is in fact itself a profoundly Don’t Understand Football take.

So, to be clear: nobody is unclear about the scale and significance of that achievement for Eddie Howe and his team.

And that scale and significance is Absolutely Huge. Not least because even the standard ‘only a Carabao’ barbs struggle to land when you consider Newcastle’s run to that trophy.

Finding themselves out of Europe they had to start back in round two in August and what was even at the time a tough draw but one that only looks even worse with hindsight against Nottingham Forest. They beat Brentford. They beat Chelsea.

In all they took down four of the other five teams currently in the top six during a single cup run, thoroughly outclassing Arsenal over two legs in the semi-final and then schooling Premier League champions-elect Liverpool in the final.

One can argue that those two clubs had larger primary targets but neither was exactly phoning it in by that stage of the tournament either. And Newcastle beat them up.

The final in particular was a spectacular performance and a huge personal triumph for Howe, who set his team up perfectly to nullify Liverpool’s huge threat at one end without ever curtailing their own attacking capabilities.

The players delivered wonderfully, but this did feel like the manager’s success every bit as much. And for a manager with obvious talent but so little experience of such major finals, that was doubly impressive.

Throw in the now very likely success of their second, Champions League-qualifying goal, and you’ve got a manager who in any normal season would be a worthy favourite for manager of the year but in this one finds himself scrapping just to stay on the podium.